Alice Taylor was surprised at the reaction 'To School Through The Fields' an account of a rural Irish childhood.
Born in 1938 on a farm in Lisdangan, Newmarket, north County Cork, Alice Taylor now lives in the village of Inishannon with her husband Gabriel Ó Murchú and their five children.
Alice Taylor originally put pen to paper to document childhood memories for her children, nieces and nephews. This would become 'To School Through The Fields', an account of an idyllic childhood in the Irish countryside during the 1940s.
That record will be there when we’re gone, and the younger people will want to know how life was.
The idea sprang from the house she grew up in, which had been inhabited by her family as far back as eight generations. She wished that one of her ancestors had written an account of their daily lives, as
Often the people who do great things in history are recorded, but the ordinary people aren’t.
Her mother Lena remembers the challenges involved in rearing fowl on their farm, especially when children were given responsibility for the undertaking of certain tasks, such as gathering eggs. Patience was required on one particular occasion when a bucket of eggs was left unattended,
The pig came on and spilled them...there was no point in getting cross. The eggs were broken; there was no more about it.
This episode of ‘I Live Here’ was broadcast 11 October 1989.
